Eventually, what seemed like a 'big deal' at the time can be either tossed away as casually as a McDonald's carton on a grassy verge, or you can sit on the grassy knoll taking potshots at the President of, well, irrelevancies.
I don't do nostalgia very much. When you're young, you're obviously building a scrapbook of memories in order to find, maybe sometimes in your teens, maybe some time in your 20s or even 30s, 40s, 50s or whenever, the kernel of who you are. But life's about change, not stasis. Show me the teen who knew, at 15 or 18 what they wanted to do with their life and I'll show you a boring, boring, bastard. I went to school with these types. They gave us careers information, for goodness' sake.
'Have you thought about the bank? The uncivil service? Insurance?'
Nope, nope and thrice nope. The idea of a life shovelling paper in a bank sounds appalling. I'd rather shovel shit for a living. At least you'd meet a superior class of rat that way.
No. I never had 'plans', at 15, to be a doctor or lawyer or all of the other stuff they nudged us towards. Looking back, way back to the mid-70s, it rather seemed that your imagination was being stifled, held down and held back, destroyed even, in order to be a solid little citizen in a 'secure' job (oh, how the now banking school chums, unskilled for anything else and currently facing early redundancy, must be marvelling in the wisdom of their career choices now). Softened by a life at a desk, hands like putty and a spine like a Matchmaker, ready to snap at the thought of physical work, they aren't even fit or qualified for labouring work if it were to become available.
